status update

[abstrax]

Hi,

Even though I have been very quiet I just want to let you know, that I'm still here and still working on the exporter. I had a hiatus of 4-5 weeks, but started to work on it again 2 weeks ago, but still have only little time.

The light tag stuff is finished so far and if you want, I can build a release. (I just updated CVS) Otherwise I will just start on the materials.

I hope I can add some basic material stuff reasonably soon.

Cheers,
Marcus

[Phoenix]

Hi Marcus,

nice to hear from you and thanks for the status update!
I'm looking forward in anticipation of the next version.

Kind regards,
Tom

[Zom-B]

Thanks for your work Marcus, I'm also looking forward to your next release

I'm also really interested about your approach to realize the material system,
maybe you can drop some lines about your ideas

[abstrax]

I'm also really interested about your approach to realize the material system,
maybe you can drop some lines about your ideas

Well, I would like to do three things initially:

1. Add UV mapping to the geometry export.
2. Create a crude conversion from C4D standard materials to Lux materials. This will only convert a few channels and only colours and perhaps bitmaps. No blending, no shaders, and so on. I guess, depending on the channel settings I will choose different Lux material types. But I don't know yet, as I haven't experimented much with Lux materials.
3. Create new material plugins (remember bhodiNUT? - something like that, but more simple) which will have Lux specific settings and allow you to accurately control every aspect of Lux materials. I plan to make them somehow renderable in C4D, but I guess in C4D they will only roughly look like Lux materials. In the first incarnation there will be very likely no shaders and stuff.

Later I plan to try to import the Lux DLL into the plugin. For this we need Lux builds with DLLs for Windows and Mac OS. If necessary I will try to setup the Lux build system to do this. The Windows build should produce DLLs already. Using the DLL I would then like to add preview renderung of materials. Then I would like to add Lux shaders incl. previews.

Please comment if the plan makes sense and if I should do step 2 or step 3 first.

Cheers,
Marcus

[abstrax]

One other thing: Could one of you guys create a set of icons? At the moment we need icons for:

- Command "LuxC4D Export" in the plugins menu.
- Command "LuxC4D Export + Render" in the plugins menu.
- Light tag.

It would be great if the icons would either be in SVG format or C4D files (which allow you to render them in different sizes).

Cheers,
Marcus

[Abel]

One other thing: Could one of you guys create a set of icons? At the moment we need icons for:

- Command "LuxC4D Export" in the plugins menu.
- Command "LuxC4D Export + Render" in the plugins menu.
- Light tag.

There is an svg file that might make a good menu logo here -> viewtopic.php?f=26&t=348#p2726.

[Zom-B]

Well, I would like to do three things initially:

1. Add UV mapping to the geometry export.

the most important feature if you want to support textures

2. Create a crude conversion from C4D standard materials to Lux materials. This will only convert a few channels and only colours and perhaps bitmaps. No blending, no shaders, and so on. I guess, depending on the channel settings I will choose different Lux material types. But I don't know yet, as I haven't experimented much with Lux materials.

Yes, material conversion is a very important feature, since it saves you a lot of time setting up the materials, some fine tuning allways needs to be done anyway.

3. Create new material plugins (remember bhodiNUT? - something like that, but more simple) which will have Lux specific settings and allow you to accurately control every aspect of Lux materials. I plan to make them somehow renderable in C4D, but I guess in C4D they will only roughly look like Lux materials. In the first incarnation there will be very likely no shaders and stuff.

Yes, a very professional approach! Just like Vray for C4D does atm... I like this very much!

Later I plan to try to import the Lux DLL into the plugin. For this we need Lux builds with DLLs for Windows and Mac OS. If necessary I will try to setup the Lux build system to do this. The Windows build should produce DLLs already. Using the DLL I would then like to add preview renderung of materials. Then I would like to add Lux shaders incl. previews.

By this approach you can integrate Lux seamless into C4D, so that even the viewport render and renderwindow output Lux images! simplifies the workflow a lot.

Please comment if the plan makes sense and if I should do step 2 or step 3 first.

For my taste I would like to see the following order: 3, 1, 2
Feature 2 without a material system for further tweaking isn't this much fun to work with, since you'll always end up with results that aren't satisfying.

thanks for your work mate!

[abstrax]

For my taste I would like to see the following order: 3, 1, 2
Feature 2 without a material system for further tweaking isn't this much fun to work with, since you'll always end up with results that aren't satisfying.

Thanks for the comment. I think I will try to do things in that order.

Cheers,
Marcus

[Stromberg90]

All of this sounds great
As i could not nagg on you anymore Abstrax XD
Realy looking forward to se how to material system is going to turn out, and if you could intergrate lux fully in the c4d viewport that would be outstanding

[Phoenix]

Any news